This is false. In Germany there are Universitäten and Hochschulen. Hochschulen are more practical, at one of these you have programming assignments or projects in nearly every subject. Universitäten are more about the theory but they still have some programming assignments, maybe one subject every semester. At some Unis CS is just a part of the Mathematics department so that is also a factor which makes them even more theoretical.

That is the theoretical construct in the German system. However the differences are fading and to me it does not seem to be like German universities, as actors of (self-proclaimed) highest art in their topics, are doing very well.

Btw: Though I enjoyed Maths much more than CS, I wouldn't have understood Linear Algebra without watching the MIT Open Courseware thingy by Gilbert Strang. I think that's saying a lot about the German art of teaching (at least at that time).

I'm not sure which university they are talking about, but both the universities I went to had both smaller (like weekly) programming assignments and large projects.

Sounds like a dream. They didn't have that at my time (2007) at Karlsruhe. Programming was negligible and could be overall circumvented by picking the according courses.

They do, but at least 15ys ago at university of Karlsruhe (which they laughably renamed to KIT at that time) people could circumvent most of the programming tasks. I looked up the current curriculum a couple of months ago, and they at least seem to have expanded from "3 weeks Java embedded into another course" to a full-blown one semester long programming course.

If you ask me, they should make programming the fabric of almost all exercises/tasks, be it in math, cs or sth else along the lines. This would, however, require professors who are in to that kind of stuff and most preferred singing powerpoint-karaoke.